At the end of last year I made a blog post entitled New Year’s Resolution? Be A Better Coder. In that post, I detailed three key areas in which I hoped resolved to improve. This is the end of the second month and here’s my progress. (Hey wait a minute, that’s not fair. This was a short month!)

1. Read More
The Idea: There is so much knowledge in both books and online. It would be a bountiful effort to take in some said knowledge.
The Goal: My goal is to read three books this year (one every four months) and subscribe to ten good blogs.
The Progress: One. More. Chapter. I have been reading Practices of an Agile Developer and I am very close to finishing it. I have but one short chapter to go. On the blog front, I have subscribed to three more programming blogs to bring my total to eight. (No, I’m not counting myself.) Now, I really want to start following more game programming blogs specifically. Anyone have any recommendations? I’ve only but a few.

2. Learn a New Language
The Idea: Every language is a tool in the toolbox. Learning more tools and maintaining a repertoire of them would be most beneficial.
The Goal: My goal is to learn and implement a few solutions in Python and in Perl.
The Progress: I have implemented some Python at work. I have been delving into SMTP, MIME, and data structures in Python to create a nightly process that will really help out. I think I gained a good chunk of knowledge and made ample progress on this (for a short month.)

3. Be an Architect
The Idea: Where a programmer applies some duct tape to stop a leak, an architect replaces the corroded pipes with sturdier ones. This is most essential to career advancement, I’d say.
The Goal: My goal here was a little more extract. It was a promise to leave things in a better state than when I found them.
The Progress: I think I created a monster! At work, I started using a tagline to legitimize a background initiative I had for cleaning up the code-base and ending a dependency on an immutable, third-party library. Well, this month it’s catching on and people have been making check-in comments beginning with the tagline. Is this being a good architect?

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